Google Wave has been in the wild for months, and Google has confirmed to me that more than 1 million people are actively using it.
But enterprise adoption of Wave may well be predicated on how many extensions are built for the open source Wave platform that will help knowledge workers better collaborate.
Wrike.com, which makes a well-regarded project management SAAS suite, Feb. 3 said it is now automatically syncing with Wave to help distributed workgroups leverage the real-time capabilities of Google’s collaboration platform to manage projects.
Project management isn’t the sexiest software in the world and workers will sympathize with fellow sufferers of Microsoft Project or Basecamp. Google Wave’s real-time collaboration perks could liven things a bit for Wrike.com users.
Wrike.com CEO Andrew Filev explained that Google Wave is a fine brainstorming, concept creation, document discussion, or note-taking platform for meetings, it lacks the facility to help workers organize and track projects. “Integration with Wrike helps to elegantly cover this gap,” he said.
Thanks to Wrike.com’s integration, made possible through the open source Google Wave API, users of Wrike.com and Wave only need to add Wrike.com as a contact to a new wave to make the wave a task in Wrike.com.
After a Wave user who has a Wrike.com account adds wrike-wave@appspot.com to his Wave contacts, the user can create tasks and set the due dates right from the Wave.
If the integration works properly, new waves created by a user are immediately turned into tasks in the project management software workspace. The title of the wave becomes the task title; the rest of the wave’s blip content is turned into the task description.
If the wave’s title contains a project name and a due date, Wrike.com puts the task in the correct project folder with the proper due date for the task. Blips in the wave added by other wave participants are added to the task as comments. See here:
Wrike.com updates the project schedules automatically, and all the changes can be seen on an interactive Gantt chart. See here:
When task are propagated in Wrike’s project management system, users can keep track of all the changes made to this task. Wrike will also automatically notify project members about updates and due date reminders via e-mail.
Wrike.com’s pricing ranges from $9.95 per user, per month for users to $19.95 for project admins. There are add-on prices available for synchronization with Outlook, Windows Mobile, iCalendar and RSS feeds.
Again, it can’t be overstated how important it is for developers to chip in their add-ons, plug-ins and integrations for Google Wave if the platform is going to gain any mindshare in enterprises. With mindshare snowballing, marketshare may follow.
No one will desert their IBM Lotus, Microsoft SharePoint or even Google Apps platforms yet, but Wave could be promising if Google and third-party collaborators such as Wrike.com continue to make Wave a valuable business tool.
Teaser: I spoke to Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard recently, and, without spoiling my future content, Google has no intentions of letting Wave gather dust.